As inflation forces Detroit families to pay 8% more for ballpoints and backpacks this back-to-school season, a historic new federal subsidy program and partnership is offering struggling families some much needed relief elsewhere on their back-to-school shopping list. This Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) allows low-income families to get home internet service completely free.
But it’s going to take an all-out push from city leaders to turn this opportunity into a reality.
Our challenge: Only about half of eligible Detroiters have signed up for this new program, leaving thousands of school-aged kids to start the year without home internet service. Closing this gap – quickly – is one of Detroit’s most urgent education equity challenges.
Here in Detroit, an estimated one in four families with kids don’t have home internet, contributing to learning losses, falling graduation rates, chronic absenteeism, and students reading below grade levels.
Even before the pandemic, 70% of teachers assigned homework that required access to broadband. Yes, Detroit schools are reopening with fully in-person classroom instruction – but home internet is still indispensable for researching and completing coursework as kids struggle to make up lost ground.
These challenges are inseparable: We can’t bridge this educational divide without bridging our digital divide. And now that the ACP makes internet service free for families in need, Detroit should step up its efforts to get all our eligible families signed up.
We know how to do this well, when we put our minds to it. Last year, when the federal government first started offering an Emergency Broadband Benefit in response to the pandemic, Detroit actually led the nation in enrollment. But since the start of 2022, as the EBB evolved into the new ACP, our pace of new sign-ups has slowed significantly. We’re losing momentum at exactly the wrong time.
Like families searching for the best buys for back-to-school supplies, Detroit’s decision-makers need to re-focus our limited resources on our most urgent needs – and not get distracted by shiny objects, such as an unrealistic $900 million scheme to build a municipally owned broadband network.
Building a duplicative set of digital pipes would take years of time we can’t spare and hundreds of millions of dollars we don’t have. Worse yet, it wouldn’t even do anything to solve our real challenge: broadband adoption. 99.3% of Detroit households already have high-speed broadband available on their doorsteps – but only 71.9% subscribe.
City leaders can close our digital divide much faster by leveraging the new ACP to get unconnected families connected immediately – for free, in many cases – to the high-speed networks already in place. An estimated 51% of our households are eligible to sign up and get home internet at no cost. It’s a solution available right now, today – not five or ten years from now.
But with just over half of eligible Detroiters signed up, we still have a long way to go to fully capitalize on this enormous opportunity.
In keeping with our heritage as America’s trailblazing Motor City and Arsenal of Democracy, Detroit now needs an all-hands-on-deck mobilization to get every school-aged household connected to the internet.
Connect 313, Detroit’s innovative public-private digital partnership, can lead the way with awareness and outreach campaigns, making sure eligible families understand how to sign up for the ACP. Schools, libraries, and community centers can double down on offering digital skills training classes and organizing ACP sign-up drives, making it as easy and convenient as possible for people to find help right in their neighborhoods. Local corporations and non-profit foundations can donate or subsidize computers for families that can’t afford their own.
We’ve got plenty of data on what works – and what doesn’t. For example, funding local non-profits to train Digital Navigators, offering hands-on support to unconnected neighbors, helps nearly 80% of participants to acquire more digital competence and confidence and 65% to obtain connectivity or an in-home computer.
By contrast, government-operated broadband networks have a sketchier record – often losing taxpayers’ money without doing anything to improve broadband adoption rates.
Now that our schools are returning to a “New Normal,” with our students interacting in-person with their teachers and each other, Detroit should devote our intellectual and financial resources to removing the real barriers that have kept too many families offline – and too many kids behind their grade levels.
Universal broadband connections and digital literacy – and not a municipal broadband boondoggle – should be Job One.
Dr. Jeffrey Robinson, Ph.D is the Principal of Paul Robeson Malcolm X Academy and adjunct professor at Wayne State University’s College of Education. Dr. Robinson is also Senior Pastor at Mount Calvary Missionary Baptist Church and serves on the Executive Board of the NAACP Detroit Branch.
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